Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - DAY 3/7 - KNOW YOUR SKILLS | Mini Trainings: Career Growth Challenge

Episode Date: March 23, 2025

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Hello and welcome to day three of our seven day career growth challenge. So in the past two days of trainings, we talked about why it's so important that you want to grow your career and salary because it will give you the inner motivation to want to take action towards progressing your career. But I think more importantly and more specifically to address the topic that many people feel unsure about, which is thinking that, hey, I don't think I'm adding value. I don't know what my actual job is. I don't know if anything I'm doing is even important at all.

I don't know if what I'm doing is even adding value. And for me to actually break it down to you and giving you the clarity like, hey, if you are not adding value, if your job has no purpose, you wouldn't have gotten hired. So, yes, you have value. And the value is the roles and responsibilities that you are currently executing in charge of overseeing at your current job right now. That is the value that you are adding at your job for your company. And it's something that you want to make your boss aware of. So, again, starting with the clarity of exactly knowing that like,

hey, this is my role and how you fit within the team in terms of contribution, the department, as well as company, which is why when we first started on day one of training, I talked about why the corporate world is like a jigsaw puzzle. So knowing exactly what your job is, how you work with different people, how you fit within that corporate jigsaw puzzle will give you so much more clarity and perspective of how to better navigate yourself

towards career growth and salary growth. Now, that is all high level. So now let's actually break it down a little bit more. So now that you know that, hey, my job has value, right? I am adding value every single day. Now let's talk about how do you make sure that you are doing a good job? Because you can say that you have a lot of value to add, but it doesn't mean anything if you can't deliver a job well done. So what does a job well done mean? It means that meeting your boss's expectation, delivering what

your role was essentially hired to do, right? As I mentioned in yesterday's training, if you don't do these things, you'll probably get fired because that was what you were hired to do. So now that we have this clarity, then let's talk about the four key skills that you need to deliver your job well done. Now again, a lot of people that talk to me

and they tell me that I want to upskill. I want to upskill, upskill, upskill. I'm like, everything, that's great. But exactly what are you upskilling and how does it help you do a better job? Because you may notice that for some people, they are always learning something. They're always saying that I wanna to learn this, learn that.

They're taking a bunch of certification. But at the end of the day, right, they might still be extremely unhappy at their job because they may not be very clear in terms of how to apply all these skills that they are saying that, you know, is so helpful to learn, but not knowing exactly how to apply and which exactly all these skills are most important to drive their corporate career forward and to meet expectations to basically be successful within the corporate nine to five. So today I'm going to tell you that it doesn't have to be very complicated essentially you only need to upskill four skills, four things and this is what I

call the top four corporate skills. And this is something that I teach to all my clients in my career program, the Corporate Survivors. So we don't go around learning a bunch of things. We need to learn things that actually helps you to deliver a good job so that you can set yourself up for a promotion, salary increment, more opportunities to grow your career and salary. So again, you want to really make sure that whatever that we're doing is achieving a key goal, and that is career progression for you.

So now, let's break it down. So when I ask people, what exactly are you trying to upskill? They don't really know either. But essentially, you need to upskill four things. So the first one is communication. Because if you cannot communicate with people, then it is impossible to want to learn how to get visible. To get visible is to go and talk to other people,

or at least at a minimum, to have the confidence to talk to your boss and your team. And without communication skills, that's going to be tough. Now, to be more specific, when I mean communication, it's not, you know, public speaking. You don't actually need public speaking. You don't actually need to become an extrovert. But what I mean by communication skill

is to be able to convey your message, to be able to deliver your message without being misunderstood. Now, the key word here is without being misunderstood. So I want you to think about all those times where you thought that you were very clear in communicating or telling another stakeholder what to do. Only for the stakeholder to come back and say that I don't know what you're talking about or that was not what I understood and I thought you meant this other thing. So that means that there are some gaps

within your communication that you would want to improve on because otherwise right right, as you rise up the career ladder, the people that you're going to talk to are going to be way more senior. And during that time, a miscommunication is likely going to be a reputation damaging mistake and you don't want that. So as I said, first skill is communication. Now the second skill that is so important is what I would call people skills and specifically the skills to build relationship, right? So relationship building. Now, again, why this is so critical is because as much as we want to work on our own,

it doesn't work like that because as I said, the corporate world is like a jigsaw puzzle. Everything is connected. You will have to work with people at some point in time. And what will make it very helpful is to have a very good working relationship with people. So how are you going to have a good working relationship with people? It's first by making sure that you can actually communicate with them in a way that they understand you

and you understand them. So we're going to go back to the foundational skill, which is once you master communication, right, you have the confidence, then when you go and talk to people and network and start building relationships and start working closely with other people and more people, it's gonna be so much smoother

because you have to call fundamentals, which is strong communication. Then the next skill. Now the next skill, in my my view is critical thinking. Now why is it so important is because if you might know someone in the office that can talk very well, seems to know everybody but is a bit of an airhead. It's a bit of basically can't really do anything or whatever that this person says. Yeah even though they may sound very confident in communicating and

seem to know a lot of people but every single thing that comes out from this person's mouth, you're always thinking that, ah, this person, right, totally doesn't know what he or she is saying. Now, that is not a reputation that you want to have because it means that no matter how many people you know, it is not going to progress your career because everyone knows that, hey, I'm not going to promote him or her because this person doesn't know anything. And this reputation will likely bring forward with you as you progress in your career, because people know people within the industry, right? So critical thinking is going to be so important because you need to know exactly

the steps that you have taken to deliver a job well done, right? So the ability to explain that, to be able to articulate it and to share it with another stakeholder, be it your boss, your team members or other stakeholders, your clients across all career levels, is going to be really critical. So that's why you need critical thinking because if you cannot explain it in a very logical way, it's almost impossible to be able to convince anyone that you know what you're talking about and therefore you will come across as lack of confidence and someone who just doesn't know what the heck is going on and again that is not a good reputation to have. So with this sort of critical thinking skills of course again we will need to rely on strong

communication skills because even if you think you know what is going on but if you cannot explain it it's like if you think that, or you're very confident that you know what you're doing and what you're doing is right in terms of your project and your pieces of work, but if you cannot communicate that, it means nothing. It means nothing. So that's why we need to always go back to the fundamentals. Now, there is a fourth key skill which I think is equally important as well, but unfortunately this is a skill that everybody wants to focus on, but they don't want to focus on the other things. And that fourth skill is productivity.

Now, why everyone wants to learn productivity, I understand, right? It's always about getting the thing done on time, right? Completing as much as possible. But would it matter if the thing that you're doing is not even important, right? So productivity is just looking at one angle. But productivity as the fourth skill, once you know how to communicate, you know how to work with everybody and you have very strong critical thinking skills to know exactly what you're doing, then when productivity comes in at the fourth skill, then it really helps you to elevate your skill set. It really

helps you to elevate your results because no boss wants a team member that seems to be very good at what he or she is doing but always cannot deliver work on time. This person is always late, this person you know is maybe a perfectionist, the thing is never out on time and that is also not a good thing. So you need a combination of all four skills and that is as the recap, communication, right, people relationship building skills, critical thinking and productivity. And all four skills tie into one another. They do not exist on its own and if you were to try to upskill one skill on its own, you may not get the results because everything is connected. Now we've only talked about the skills, but there is an overarching thing that you need

to appreciate, which is the thing about skill set, right? You can learn, you know, 100, 1000 skills. Yeah, I mean, it's just a skills like how I imagine it is like a skill, a bunch of skills that you have in your toolbox, but how you're going to apply these skills is actually the environment that you're in. So therefore, the thing that you need to get clear about is, again, back to the role that you're hired to do. Because whatever skills that you have picked up,

you're going to apply within the role that you're hired for. So you have no clarity around what you're supposed to be doing, then even if you pick up a bunch of skills, it's not going to be helpful as well. So I'll say that the actual sequence that you want to follow is clarity of your job scope, then obviously having the confidence knowing that, hey, I have the right experience and skills

to be able to deliver a job well done. Then, of course, the third one is to continue upskilling your skill set so that you can continue to add value. So the sequence will be clarity, confidence, and then competence. And this is the exact flow that I teach in my career program, the corporate survivor. Step one is about get clear on the corporate world because if you don't recognize that I am working in an organization, corporate is like a jigsaw puzzle.

I need to be clear of the job that I'm hired to do, super clear around how I'm adding I am working in an organization, corporate is like a jigsaw puzzle. I need to be clear of the job that I'm hired to do, super clear around how I'm adding value, what exactly I need to deliver, then how are you going to develop confidence, right? So clarity first, then that's why even in my career program, we go through clarity. Then when we get into phase two, then we get confident with corporate skills. Now we know exactly, okay, this is the job I'm hired to do. Then these are the skills that I need to enhance, I need to master so that I continue to feel more confident

in the way that I'm completing my work, of my experiences, of my abilities. They're all connected to one another, but it all starts with understanding the corporate world and gaining clarity on your job scope. And I would say that even in my career program, most of the time, even in our monthly mentoring calls with Q&A members, with our members in our career program

to talk about their career challenges, their workplace challenges, a big portion is really talking about clarity and understanding their role, understanding how to work with different people and how to exactly apply the top four skills that we have just talked about. So this is really really really critical. To master the skills, it can only come from practice. But what would increase your success in application of the skills is having a very very good understanding of what your job is, what your boss's job is and

how the corporate world works. It will really give you the clarity, confidence and competence to be able to master all the skill sets that you need so that you can be successful not only in this job but in any other job. And mastering all these skills are going to be so important when you get to the next phase which is you want to sell your value, you want to get visible so that we can then ask for that career growth as well as salary growth, right? So see all these as extremely core fundamentals that you need to master to give you that real inner confidence and give you that clear strategy of asking for that career growth, asking for that salary growth.

It all leads step by step, piece by piece, towards that bigger career and salary growth goal that you want. So I leave it to you to really go through a very very simple exercise with yourself, really write down out of these four skills. Which are the skills that I need to upskill? Is it communication so that I can talk to people without being misunderstood? Is it people and relationship building skills where I can get along with every single person I work with? Or is it critical thinking skills which is having the ability to explain logically how I am delivering results in my role?

Or is it productivity skills where you need to make sure that you are delivering your work on time that meets expectation? Which exactly of these skills that you need to work on? And I also want you to write down, what do you think is actually stopping you from upskilling these skills? Is it you fear judgment? You feel like you are afraid someone says that you are not a good communicator? Or maybe you have a mindset block that, oh, I'm an introvert, so therefore I will not be able to communicate well. Is that those kind of mindset blocks? So actually just write down which is the skills that you have the biggest gap, right?

Meaning the main skill that you want to upskill, but also the other part around what is actually stopping you from taking that step forward. Until you know exactly what is stopping you, then it's gonna be very difficult to want to upskill. Because like I said to me this is really the heart and soul of corporate career success. Once you know how to master all these core corporate skills which is really only four at the baseline then you can only

set yourself up for success to guarantee that you're always adding value in whatever role, whatever job, whatever company and whatever industry that you find yourself in. That's how you're going to be able to continue to level up, not just your career, but your salary and also open up more opportunities because you know that you are adding value. So I'll leave you today with this piece of training and I'll see you tomorrow.